Barrel racing finals

Our provincial barrel racing finals were at the end of July, and for the first time since I medical'd out in 2012 I was entered!  I would have liked to take little miss Lefta but I didn't think she was quite ready for it, and to be honest my budget played a part in deciding how many horses to take so I ended up just entering on Voodoo.
We're still a work in progress, he is quite an independent cuss and likes to do things his way. I swear that horse thinks he just needs a rider to make things official lol  I've also picked up some bad habits the last few years, and they tend to come out more on Voodoo than Lefta (probably because I feel I need to babysit her a bit more so I'm more conscious of what I'm doing - however some of the habits do spill over to her too, just not as strongly as with V).
My game plan this year was to just have fun and fix my problems and hope that helps Voodoo enough to fix his.  Sadly we only got one run... we missed running the first day and while we were able to make it to the second day that meant we automatically wouldn't make the short go even if we placed well enough.
Tuesday, day one, we got 3 1/2" of rain before it was even time to head out.  Our RM has done a horrible job with our roads the last few years and any amount of rain makes them a slimy mess, add on that my 4X4 isn't working and it just wasn't worth it to me to risk it.  I had visions of trying to get down the road and have the trailer start to slide and end up in the ditch **shudder**  A few people gave me a hard time, some pretty badly, but you know what... MY trailer, MY horse.  Not worth it to me.
So there we were, one run on day two and the funny thing was I wasn't nervous at all.  Nada.  I texted my friend Marge before my run and said "I don't feel nervous at all to run. I actually feel kinda meh"  Which is probably part of the reason we had a pretty good run!  It didn't pick up any day money, and wouldn't have gotten us to the short go even if we could have qualified, but I managed to do almost what I wanted to!
A good friend had pointed out earlier this season that I tend to turn first and just kinda wait for second to be there. As she put it I'm turning second as soon as I'm out of first, I need to RIDE my horse to second.  Which is where the almost comes in, I rode him about half way to second and then I quit on him.  Dang it.  I also meant to go to two hands between second and third and I didn't, which caused us to bump third... which I was sure meant it was down but low and behold it stayed up!  My issues with not riding to second have been causing us to knock second, or if we salvage that barrel we knock third.  Not every time, but we've had more barrels down than I'm happy with.
So our achievements were... I RODE my horse, sort of, to second (half marks for that), we had a clean run (yay), and we made a time within the goal I had set for us.  All in all I was happy :)